Thoughts on tomorrow

One reason for this blog is to record and share thoughts, feelings, musings, and rational - or lack of rational - as I experience and try to work out what my day trading will look like. Right or wrong.

I have been giving some thought to tomorrow and what it will look like. I am trying to decide whether or not I should sell one of the positions that I have taken a pretty large beating on. I came up with some interesting graphs of the data I have been collecting. This first chart plots the stocks that are at or below -10% gain (i.e. a loss) at day 5:

It is interesting  to note that of the 5 stocks charted, 3 of the 5 were all purchased on the same day.

This next one shows all of the stocks purchased on the day in question:

 

Nearly all of them took a dive today. Of course the one I am holding happens to be covering the bottom. I think this offers some justification for delaying the sale - the stocks are all being pulled by the general market, and not necessarily how people are valuing the individual stocks.

I noticed something though that sets this stock apart, one of the metrics I use as buy criteria had an especially large value: >7; 4 to 5 times what the average is. I filtered all of the stocks for a value of over 2:

You will notice that there are several repeats,  there are only four different symbols for 8 series. The stock in question appears 4 times - and they are all on the bottom end. Doesn't look good.

Bottom line: I have no idea. THe lack of a definitive sell strategy over the last couple of weeks has really troubled me and I have been spending a lot of time trying to make sense out of something, I don't feel that I am much closer. Or perhaps it is better to say, I don't have much more of a basis for deciding when to sell. I tried to work something out with technical metrics over the spring and summer, and for one reason or another, nothing worked very well. Maybe I should try to come up with a good short strategy... hmm... that might be an idea. Whatever happens tomorrow - it is very likely that I will again take a look at today's data and try to figure out how I could have predicted it... I am not sure that this is at all possible. I am just not at all sure that the answer is some metric. The more I do this, the more I am aware of how much of the game is a mental one - or intuitive, rather than a technical analysis one. Maybe it is mostly about going out and doing it.

I decided to throw one more chart in. This last one plots the average % gain realized, calculated via the close, high, and low for the day, for all purchases:

I thought this was kind of interesting, and not really sure what to make of it all yet. It is pretty remarkable how uniform the high, low, and close for the day remains. I am pretty sure the two dips are the last couple of days of trading. Keep in mind too that this data is weighted towards the front end - not all of the stocks have 34 days worth of data. This new trend in the general market may re-define the averages.

Another day tomorrow. I think I will try to hold, but if the market goes south, time to sell.